That doesn’t apply to Linux communities on Lemmy though, but I meet a lot of Linux communities, that are toxic and beginner-unfriendly. People, who have voluntarily decided to maintain a community, behave like I broke into their house at 3 AM with my questions. If I ask a question, there will be a 20% chance to get any relevant response, but a 100% chance of being nagged with some bullshit. It especially applies to the behaviour of mods. For instance, a dude was messing with me because I have searched for a binary on the official internet database, instead of quering it via package manager.
I wish I could just avoid junkyards like that, but I can’t: I haven’t found another active community for Void Linux.
As far as I can tell from my experience, it is something specific to Linux or IT communities.
So why is it like this?
Imagine every day I ask you what the color of the sky is. There are a bunch of forum threads that tell me the sky color, there is a wiki with sky color information, and the search can give me the sky colour. I have all the information I need to work out the sky color, but I still keep asking you.
That is what these communities often deal with, it grinds you down and gives you have a short fuse.
The same thing happens in trans communities, but the answer isn’t for the old guard to try and handle everything themselves, burn out and then shut down newbies that are looking for community and help.
The answer is for the crusty old guard to create the space and keep the worst offenders out, whilst letting the people that aren’t burnt out support each other and keep the community thriving.
Sometimes that means letting common questions be common, because if you’ve got a positive community, someone will always be there with an answer and a link to an even more detailed resource.
If the newbies don’t stick around to contribute back, then that doesn’t work well. The trans community (at least from an outsiders perspective) seem a lot more close-knit, so it probably works better?
For technical communities, it doesn’t seem like the communal support exists to the same degree. Newbies come in, get their answer and leave. :(
I guess because an answer to a technical question doesn’t affect someone’s whole life.
I’ll always be in debt to the Trans community here on Lemmy because of how they helped me, even though I’m not a member of the community.
Why bother even engaging though. There will always be those repeats it’s inevitable. It’s just because people still want an excuse to dunk. Just ignore and the poster will figure it out themselves, the whole point of posting instead of searching first is laziness.
Whether you engage or not, its a constant noise that has to be dealt with.
Then the settings for sky color are not there.